It’s Okay

What was your plan for graduating and what actually happened?

Simon: I had planned to work on my portfolio extensively and then apply for interviews in any studio that would let me in the door. Luckily the good people at Conor & David (now working under the moniker of  WorkGroup)  let me interview before I had even finished my degree show. Before I knew it an internship somehow turned into a job and that was that.

Shauna: I actually haven't graduated yet, but i'm about to enter into my final year of Visual Communication in IADT. I've also been lucky enough to spend some time working in WorkGroup. (I'm not copying Simon, I promise.) After that, we plan on seeing/living/working in some other countries. In saying that, Simon and I have been working together for over two years and I've been doing some work on my own. Waiting to finish college to start working never made much sense to me.

Whats your take on internships? (do you take interns now?)

We’re not really sure the standard studio model is the one for us. We get internship requests all the time and do our best to reply to everyone but it seems unlikely that we’ll be expanding anytime soon for multiple reasons. We like doing the work and the idea of delegating less exciting tasks to someone 'below' us sounds pretty weird right now.

At the same time, we think internships are great. They open a lot of doors and give a lot of insight and we’ve both benefitted greatly from the time we’ve spent with other studios. Even to just get a glimpse of how an actual business functions is a revelation.

On the concept of internships as a whole, while we do think predominantly positive things we have seen a bunch of situations where people have been taken advantage of. Our advice would be to make sure you are getting what you deserve, financially or otherwise, out of the process.

What advice would you give students starting out?

Google things thoroughly and only after you think you’ve exhausted every avenue possible ask a human being a question. The information is out there.

Try to meet people without being weird, the social aspect of our industry has proven itself way more fruitful than either of us could have ever imagined.

Get real work with a real client even if you don't know what you're doing. It sounds like a cliché but so much learning happens when you are frightened of disappointing a real person who is giving you actual money.

While we’ve never encountered it, a bunch of our colleagues have had experiences with students that were unbearable because the students had a little too much confidence upon leaving college. Don’t be like those people, none of us knows enough.

What role does digital design play in your studio in 2017, and how to you apply traditional graphic design skills in a digital age?

A large swathe of the work we do is digital but we don’t really consider ourselves a digital design studio. Graphic design skills are pretty evenly applicable to any medium. Obviously there are different considerations but as whole we don’t see the work we do in print to be that much different in approach to the work we do digitally. If we are being honest with ourselves, the possibilities of what you can do right now with interactive work are pretty mesmerising, new ground is broken every day, but if we could pore over a book for the next few months we absolutely would.